Hyperlinks between changes

The Github plugin decorates Jenkins "Changes" pages to create links to your Github commit and issue pages. It adds a sidebar link that links back to the Github project page.

When creating a job, specify that is connects to git. Under "Github project", put in: git@github.com:Person/Project.git Under "Source Code Management" select Git, and put in git@github.com:Person/Project.git

Manual Mode

In this mode, you'll be responsible for registering the hook URLs to GitHub. Click the icon to see the URL in Jenkins that receives the post-commit POSTs. Just go to Step 3.

Automatic Mode (Jenkins manages hooks for jobs by itself)

In this mode, Jenkins will automatically add/remove hook URLs to GitHub based on the project configuration in the background. You'll specify GitHub OAuth token so that Jenkins can login as you to do this.

Step 1. Go to the global configuration and add GitHub Server Config.

Step 2.1. Create your personal access token in GitHub.

Plugin can help you to do it with all required scopes. Go to Advanced -> Manage Additional GitHub Actions -> Convert Login and Password to token

You can also redefine GitHub url by clicking on Custom GitHub API URL checkbox.
Note that credentials are filtered by entered GH url with help of domain requirements. So you can create credentials in different domains and see only credentials that matched by predefined domains.

Step 3. Once that configuration is done, go to the project config of each job you want triggered automatically and simply check "Build when a change is pushed to GitHub" under "Build Triggers". With this, every new push to the repository automatically triggers a new build.

Note that there's only one URL and it receives all post-receive POSTs for all your repositories. The server side of this URL is smart enough to figure out which projects need to be triggered, based on the submission.

Security Implications

This plugin requires that you have an HTTP URL reachable from GitHub, which means it's reachable from the whole internet. So it is implemented carefully with the possible malicious fake post-receive POSTS in mind. To cope with this, upon receiving a POST, Jenkins will talk to GitHub to ensure the push was actually made.

Jenkins inside a firewall

In case your Jenkins run inside the firewall and not directly reachable from the internet, this plugin lets you specify an arbitrary endpoint URL as an override in the automatic mode. The plugin will assume that you've set up reverse proxy or some other means so that the POST from GitHub will be routed to the Jenkins.

Trouble-shooting hooks

If you set this up but build aren't triggered, check the following things:

Click the "admin" button on the GitHub repository in question and make sure post-receive hooks are there.

If it's not there, make sure you have proper credential set in the Jenkins system config page.

com.cloudbees.jenkins.GitHubWebHook
and you'll see the log of Jenkins trying to install a post-receive hook.

Click "Test hook" button from the GitHub UI and see if Jenkins receive a payload.

Using cache to GitHub requests

Each GitHub Server Config creates own GitHub client to interact with api. By default it uses cache (with 20MB limit) to speedup process of fetching data and reduce rate-limit consuming. You can change cache limit value in "Advanced" section of this config item. If you set 0, then this feature will be disabled for this (and only this) config.

Additional info:

This plugin now serves only hooks from github as main feature. Then it starts using git-plugin to fetch sources.

Possible Issues between Jenkins and GitHub

Windows:

In windows, Jenkins will use the the SSH key of the user it is running as, which is located in the %USERPROFILE%\.ssh folder ( on XP, that would be C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\.ssh, and on 7 it would be C:\Users\USERNAME\.ssh). Therefore, you need to force Jenkins to run as the user that has the SSH key configured. To do that, right click on My Computer, and hit "Manage". Click on "Services". Go to Jenkins, right click, and select "Properties". Under the "Log On" tab, choose the user Jenkins will run as, and put in the username and password (it requires one). Then restart the Jenkins service by right clicking on Jenkins (in the services window), and hit "Restart".

Jenkins does not support passphrases for SSH keys. Therefore, if you set one while running the initial Github configuration, rerun it and don't set one.

Pipeline examples

Setting commit status

This code will set commit status for custom repo with configured context and message (you can also define same way backref)